Conflicting Views on Fair Siting Processes: Evidence from Austria and the U.S.

The authors maintain that, by granting legitimacy to different notions of fairness and building on common values such as responsibility, it is possible to design siting procedures that promote social cohesion, trust and a sense of fair play

The Danube River Basin: International Cooperation or Sustainable Development

The environmental deterioration of the Danube River basin calls for unprecedented cooperation among the ten riparian and seven non-riparian basin countries, the majority of which are undergoing major economic and political transformations after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This paper discusses the recent legal and institutional developments along with the political hurdles leading to a post-Soviet regime for managing the Danube River and promoting sustainable development in the basin. After reviewing the geography and ecology, the conflicts and political issues of the Danube, the current efforts at building cooperative institutions are discussed. The question whether the Danube will be exclusively the responsibility of the basin countries, will include the Russian Federation and other countries of the Black Sea, or will be the responsibility of pan-European institutions in close connection with the European Union is addressed

Transformative adaptation through nature-based solutions: a comparative case study analysis in China, Italy, and Germany

This paper explores how claims for transformative adaptation toward more equitable and sustainable societies can be assessed. We build on a theoretical framework describing transformative adaptation as it manifests across four core elements of the public-sector adaptation lifecycle: vision, planning, institutional frameworks, and interventions. For each element, we identify characteristics that can help track adaptation as transformative. Our purpose is to identify how governance systems can constrain or support transformative choices and thus enable targeted interventions. We demonstrate and test the usefulness of the framework with reference to three government-led adaptation projects of nature-based solutions (NBS): river restoration (Germany), forest conservation (China), and landslide risk reduction (Italy). Building on a desktop study and open-ended interviews, our analysis adds evidence to the view that transformation is not an abrupt system change, but a dynamic complex process that evolves over time. While each of the NBS cases fails to fulfill all the transformation characteristics, there are important transformative elements in their visions, planning, and interventions. There is a deficit, however, in the transformation of institutional frameworks. The cases show institutional commonalities in multi-scale and cross-sectoral (polycentric) collaboration as well as innovative processes for inclusive stakeholder engagement; yet, these arrangements are ad hoc, short-term, dependent on local champions, and lacking the permanency needed for upscaling. For the public sector, this result highlights the potential for establishing cross-competing priorities among agencies, cross-sectoral formal mechanisms, new dedicated institutions, and programmatic and regulatory mainstreaming

Dealing with femtorisks in international relations

The contemporary global community is increasingly interdependent and confronted with systemic risks posed by the actions and interactions of actors existing beneath the level of formal institutions, often operating outside effective governance structures. Frequently, these actors are human agents, such as rogue traders or aggressive financial innovators, terrorists, groups of dissidents, or unauthorized sources of sensitive or secret information about government or private sector activities. In other instances, influential .actors. take the form of climate change, communications technologies, or socioeconomic globalization. Although these individual forces may be small relative to state governments or international institutions, or may operate on long time scales, the changes they catalyze can pose significant challenges to the analysis and practice of international relations through the operation of complex feedbacks and interactions of individual agents and interconnected systems. We call these challenges "femtorisks," and emphasize their importance for two reasons. First, in isolation, they may be inconsequential and semiautonomous; but when embedded in complex adaptive systems, characterized by individual agents able to change, learn from experience, and pursue their own agendas, the strategic interaction between actors can propel systems down paths of increasing, even global, instability. Second, because their influence stems from complex interactions at interfaces of multiple systems (e.g., social, financial, political, technological, ecological, etc.), femtorisks challenge standard approaches to risk assessment, as higher-order consequences cascade across the boundaries of socially constructed complex systems. We argue that new approaches to assessing and managing systemic risk in international relations are required, inspired by principles of evolutionary theory and development of resilient ecological systems

Innovations for Sustainability: Pathways to an efficient and post-pandemic future

3rd Report prepared by The World in 2050 initiativ

Siting an LNG terminal in California: a descriptive framework

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is, as the name suggests, a gas that is liquefied for purposes of transportation. To liquefy natural gas, its temperature is reduced to −160°, at which point the volume of the gas is reduced to approximately one- six hundredth of its original volume. Presently, there are 16 receiving plants in the world, primarily in Japan, in Western Europe, and in the US. A typical tank has a volume of 80 000m3; there are usually from two to four of these tanks at a receiving terminal. The early ships had a capacity of something around 27 000m3 present ships as high as 130 000m3. It was estimated that in 1981 there would be at least 57 LNG carriers operating in the world with a combined capacity of over 5.21 million m3

Global Change, Natural Disasters and Loss-Sharing: Issues of Efficiency and Equity.

Abstract not availableJRC.(ISIS)-Institute For Systems, Informatics And Safet

Global Change, Natural Disasters and Loss-sharing: Issues of Efficiency and Equity

Global change in the form of climate warming, demographic developments, land use and capital movements to vulnerable regions will likely contribute to the already increasing human and economic losses from natural disasters. As countries in both the developing and developed world contemplate increasing losses from natural disasters, and as the victims relate these losses to human culpability, questions of burden-sharing for preventing and absorbing human and financial losses are becoming increasingly topical. This paper provides an overview of two forms of state and market burden-sharing at the local and global levels: collective loss-sharing after a major disaster by the state or the international community and the pre-disaster transfer of risk through insurance and other hedging instruments. With the recent attention given to the role of the private sector for apportioning and preventing disaster losses, we examine the efficiency and equity arguments for both collective loss-sharing and private risk transfer. We give special attention to the potential for governments of poor countries to transfer their natural disaster risks to the insurance and reinsurance markets, and to the international capital markets with newly developing hedging instruments, such as catastrophe bonds. We suggest that, under certain conditions, subsidized risk transfer can be an efficient and equitable way for industrialized countries to assume partial responsibility for the increasing disaster losses in poor countries, in addition to their role in aiding the economies of these countries. The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance (2000) 25, 203–219. doi:10.1111/1468-0440.00060